Our A/C condensate drain has been clogged up. Luckily, we had paid the A/C guy extra to add a ball valve and schrader valve to the line to make cleaning it out a breeze. I should know better, none of my projects are a breeze! I climbed up in the attic to attach the hose and Amber stood on the ground with control of the air valve. I got it connected and told her to go. I could hear air moving, so I figured it worked. She started yelling, stop! STOP! Turns out all the gunk in the line (and it was substantial) made it down to the bathroom sink, but it decided to turn up toward the walls, ceiling, and everywhere instead of stay down in the drain where it was welcome. We managed to get it all cleaned up, but I scrubbed the paint off the walls in some places. And how in the hell do you clean popcorn textured ceiling? Here are some pictures of the mess:
We have a devious mouse in our garage that doesn’t fall for the variety of snap traps or glue traps we have set. I built a homemade mouse trap from a 5 gallon bucket, piece of wire, piece of PVC pipe, and a scrap piece of wood. Some peanut butter is placed on the PVC pipe. The mouse should smell the peanut butter, climb up the board, venture out on the pipe to get the peanut butter, lose its balance and fall into the bucket with water in it. It won’t be able to swim forever, so it will eventually drown. The nice thing about this style of trap is that it can catch several rodents without having to be reset. Some people put some oil in the water, which forms a smell barrier on the top so it won’t smell as bad if you have to leave the trap alone for a long time.
There were some smart free-market thinkers back in the 90’s who warned us about the danger of shipping our jobs overseas to take advantage of extremely cheap labor. (Sir James Goldsmith and Ross Perot)
